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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/27429739">Unforgotten</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/crowroad/pseuds/crowroad'>crowroad</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Supernatural</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Brother Feels, Brotherly Love, Curtain Fic, Episode: s15e18 Despair, Magic, Metaphysics, Other, Season/Series 15, Spoilers</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-11-07</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-11-07</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-07 00:41:40</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Not Rated</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>2,136</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/27429739</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/crowroad/pseuds/crowroad</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Where, Sam says, for how long? </p><p>Just a drive, Dean says, there’s a full moon.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Dean Winchester &amp; Sam Winchester</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>6</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>40</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>Unforgotten</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>The bunker is a steppe, the footsteps of god still ash in its dust. Cosmic draft whistling where so many souls have dissolved. Where doors have opened to Oz and apocalypse and death’s own library.</p><p>We're alone on this earth, Sam's shoulders say. Alone.</p><p>He and Jack drove back in defeat; Jack silent; Sam slumped.</p><p>They find Dean against a wall with a bottle and a glass; air ozonic; dimensional wounds.</p><p>Alone, Dean’s shoulders say, on this earth and all the others.</p><p>No-one else says anything at all.</p><p>
  <strong>*</strong>
</p><p>Sam sleeps for two days. Dean drinks and sleeps on and off. Jack locks his door and pads out once or twice, shy kitten or ghost, into the library or the kitchen and then back again.</p><p>It isn’t as though there are cases; it isn’t as though they can find the thread anymore, of the cosmos, or the bank of great levers, or whatever it was they once thought they'd pull.</p><p>Grief is Sam's forte. Anger is Dean's. Defeat is neither of theirs, but that’s all they have, or so Dean says on the third day, when he finally cooks, just some eggs, and Sam sits down and Jack’s nowhere to be found, and Sam says:</p><p>
  <em>Cas is dead. Everyone is dead.</em>
</p><p>They must have talked about it; they did talk about it, but neither of them can remember when.</p><p>Dean puts down plates and forgets the coffee. Sam tugs at the neck of his shirt. Something about him is trembling, though only Dean can probably see.</p><p>The roads are calling, or they would be. If that could be how they cope.</p><p>
  <strong>*</strong>
</p><p>They’re not dead, Dean says, they’re gone. Just--</p><p>Sam tries to do laundry. Jack comes out in a coat and a beanie and pair of gloves, like air can’t touch him, and sits careful in the kitchen and asks what's next.</p><p>Getting our bearings, Dean says.</p><p>If there are any left to get, Sam says, and Jack looks at him like he’s known, somehow, that it would always end here.</p><p>I should, Jack says, clean up my room while I still can.</p><p>It doesn’t make any sense, but Dean watches him go and taps Sam on the back of the hand and says, we should go.</p><p>Where, Sam says, for how long?</p><p>Just a drive, Dean says, there’s a full moon.</p><p>
  <strong>*</strong>
</p><p>Highway and town: high-concept cable dystopia; moonlit production values but no heart at all.</p><p>They drive. Back roads are better. Kansas they know and love, if they still could. Desolate, but meant to be.</p><p>You love her? Dean asks. Baby humming’s the only thing. The one thing god can’t take.</p><p>Yeah, Sam says, I did. Eileen was the only one, since Jess, that I might have--well, that I might have.</p><p>Dean doesn't say anything to that. </p><p>They loved Cas. He was an angel, but by the end, human. This is what they say to each other without saying.</p><p>Sam says, we've lost so much, we <em>are</em>  loss. That’s what we are.</p><p>Dean pulls her over, side of a field road that strips east through fallow corn. Big moon, but still some stars.</p><p>I guess this is Chuck's final test? Sam says. </p><p>Hard re-set? Dean says, though that’s not really a question.</p><p>A world without Winchesters has always been a choice. Or it’s been one before. Or a world without one of them, but that’s not really a question at all.</p><p>I’ve said it before, Sam says, but maybe we just go. Step off the board.</p><p>But, Dean says, where do we go?  The bunker? The Empty? What if we were never here?</p><p>I've never wanted to be talked about, Sam says. I never--</p><p>But we don't fade away, either, Dean says, it doesn’t seem like—</p><p>
  <em>Us.</em>
</p><p>
  <strong>*</strong>
</p><p>There’s no-one around them, nothing on the news, the radar, any map they can conjure. Weather warm for this time of year. The bunker settles and the magic of it falls, flickers; dimensional dimmer-switch and who knows how long.</p><p>Dean says he doesn’t like not knowing what’s coming.</p><p>Sam says it’s that they need something, anything—</p><p>to break the surface of their grief, he does not say, but reads in the library all day and writes, and tells Dean at dinner (white rice, expired spices and frozen greens; that’s for Sam) that there’s maybe one road they can take, one way that might let them well, out. Out of what it’s hard to say.</p><p>Sam says, I don’t know if I like the idea of using—</p><p>Yeah, I know, Dean says, that kind of magic.</p><p>But it’s the only magic left, Sam says, that really fits.</p><p>What about Jack? Dean says. </p><p>We'll take him with us, Sam says, or we can try.</p><p>
  <strong>*</strong>
</p><p>There's no place on earth that's safe anymore, but also no world to save, and that, friends, is the --</p><p>Catch-22, sort of, Dean says, and smiles for the first time in days.</p><p>I don't--Sam says, but doesn’t finish. There’s a lot to do, for there being nothing to do.</p><p>The monsters are elsewhere. It's not clear they’re alone entirely, but they’re well, pretty alone. Except for the ghosts. EMF is alive, constant, flagging the veil like a sad superhighway. Women in white with thumbs out. Nowhere to go.</p><p>They bury themselves in books. They drive empty roads. They track ghosts. A windstorm in the next county stops them, mostly for awe. They drive back home and strip winter dust from their clothes, from Sam’s hair, stand in the showers and salt the drains and burn some sage. Like this is how they purify. Like this is it; their desert.</p><p>Jack doesn't say anything. Doesn't want sweets at abandoned rest stops. Doesn't touch anything, least of all either of them.</p><p>In the war room, he sits gloved, blanket over his shoulders like a lead shield. A ward.</p><p>Sam, Jack says, I have to go.</p><p>Go where? Sam says, like all there is is the heartbreak of going.</p><p>A book, tooled goatskin, Celtic whorls, moves slowly across the table to Sam’s hand.</p><p>Did you just do that, Sam says.</p><p>Just, Jack says, with me around, what you’re doing won’t—it won’t work. </p><p>But we just got you back, Sam says, we just—</p><p>He reaches for Jack across the table, but Jack sends his chair back in a rush, lets Sam see the pyre in his eyes, the way he did when he was new-born, just him and Sam in the dark and the world split wide.</p><p>I have to go, he says.</p><p>
  <strong>*</strong>
</p><p>Dean’s in the garage, running his hands over machines, shining. He won't pray, but he talks to Cas anyway, and to Mom and to Dad, a reckoning.</p><p>Sam prays to Cas in the library, for old times’ sake:</p><p>I don't know if you—I don’t know what you’re a part of now, Cas, if you can even hear; I never knew what angels were, really, even though, well--</p><p>
  <em>even though they walked inside me more than once.</em>
</p><p>I don’t know what I’m saying anymore, Sam says, but thank you for saving Dean. And me. And for—</p><p>There’s an electric spike that stakes Sam, makes him want to bolt, but he’s bound.</p><p>Really, Sam, Chuck says, still praying to lost causes?</p><p>He’s sitting there, holding the goatskin book and another that Sam knows, and he’s smiling.</p><p>Dean! Sam shouts, like somehow all that cement won’t—</p><p>Calm down, Chuck says, I’m here to tell you that I can’t let you do it.</p><p>Do what, Sam says.</p><p>Really? says Chuck, <em>infamati et obliterati</em>?</p><p>Sam swallows, thinks of all the blood this'll take:</p><p>I-</p><p>I can let you have the <em>forgotten </em>but not the other, I guess, Chuck says.</p><p>What? Sam says.</p><p>I admit I was, Chuck says, kind of a wrathful asshole. His hands land on the table; <em>wrathful</em> not quite in quotes.</p><p>Sam would strangle god, shoot god again if he could, but he can’t.</p><p>And I’m sorry, Chuck says, you and Dean, you’re broken, but--</p><p>In the end no writer wants his creations disgraced, Chuck says, and—</p><p>He snaps and there Dean is, rooted next to Sam like a boundary tree.</p><p>And I admit, Chuck says, that after all this time you deserve to write your own ending.</p><p>He pushes the books across the table. A pen too, for good measure, and a key.</p><p>Or endings, Chuck says.</p><p>What the hell? Dean says.</p><p>But Chuck is gone.</p><p>Jack is gone too.</p><p>
  <strong>*</strong>
</p><p>Sam once prayed in a junkyard; Dean too. Now they’re what, mystics of sorts, direct line to creation in the palms of their hands.</p><p>What, Dean says, cancel death and what happens? A new life begins? Last check, there were no reapers left to--</p><p><em>Stories, Metatron said, </em>is what he remembers. Those were the days.</p><p>So, Dean says, we end up in an invisible bunker, two old hermits on the edge of town.</p><p>Or, Sam says, two mysterious men of letters that no-one remembers after they leave the room.</p><p>We walk off the map, Sam says, off all the dimensions except the unplottable.</p><p>Like some sort of dimensional hostage exchange, Dean says, and Sam smiles, says the spell might take time, might bind and free them at once, might hold them away from death or take them to it, before they settle again in the places they’ve loved.</p><p>They might stand close, burn blood in a bowl.</p><p>They might hear the metaphysical cogs, bunker hum and ward, click solid into place.</p><p>
  <strong>*</strong>
</p><p>One day, not long after, they drive out and turn the key. Watch life flow back into the world like colored water out of a cosmic faucet. Watch beloveds form from whorls of psi, watch the world begin to breathe on its own, from behind the veil of their own devising.</p><p>When everything's stripped from you, there’s nothing better than to—</p><p>That’s not for us, Dean says, but he doesn’t mean they can’t touch the world they saved, that they didn’t save it again.</p><p>Back in the library again, Sam sits and writes:</p><p>
  <em>The exercise of free will can’t be centralized.</em>
</p><p><em>It's </em> <em>neither nihilism nor faith, but something else.</em></p><p>
  <em>Dean Winchester doesn’t believe in god. Or that he deserves to be saved. Even now, after all this time. He killed Death twice. And Hitler.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>He saved me.</em>
</p><p>Dean writes:</p><p>
  <em>Sam. This is what I want. No, scratch that. It only matters what you want. I could have stuck myself in a box and locked myself away, but you wouldn't have it. I could have died a grunt. But you wouldn't let me. I know you wanted normal life and I used to laugh at that but I was wrong. I'll always be sorry for that. How's this? </em>
</p><p>
  <em>Sam Winchester becomes a hunter, a college boy, a hunter again, a man of letters, a …witch, or even a husband, a father, a grandfather. He lives a long life that makes up for all the times he went to hell and died and came back and saved the world. He was always a brother first. The best. He gets his sunset in the end, if not the picket fence. How's that, Sammy? That's my happy ending but it could be yours too.</em>
</p><p><em>Dean Winchester,</em> Sam writes, <em>finds joy in the simple pleasures. He once thought he wanted freedom but peace is not half bad. </em></p><p>
  <strong> <em>*</em> </strong>
</p><p>Chuck and Amara are curled round each other, just light and dark, no bodies for the time being. And the world is still. </p><p>Winchesters write faster than god ever did. They write until they meet in the middle and the road rises up like the spine of a book. Here, on their axis mundi, a superposition of them. The world will be OK, god said once, because it has you. But this is different, the not having; the being.</p><p>One Wednesday Sam's shoulder aches and he steps out the door and he walks and circles back and does some research, hits memory lane for awhile, flames up a spell. Dean's been writing too, just jotting a recipe in the kitchen, and they lock eyes and head out on a hunt without even having to say where. There's no heaven or hell unless they want there to be. </p><p>Did you ever think? Dean says.</p><p>No, Sam says, but--</p><p>Hey, Dean says, this is better than--</p><p>Winchesterland? Sam says, and laughs, because that's what it's like, only with more sky and wheat than they ever thought, all true-gold and far-off thunder.</p><p>Want to stop by the Roadhouse today, Dean asks, have a beer? </p><p>Sam nods in shotgun, can feel Nebraska warm in the sun and the highway and home and all the days of the world. </p><p>
  <strong>*</strong>
</p><p>They magic the bunker extra, though only they can see.</p><p>They don't know, really, when they'll be back. </p>
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